When I make my posts in my Hong Kong blog, I use its custom search function and directly copies the URL of desired search results. However, in recent experience, I can’t do it anymore. That’s because there are extra parameters are now included, on top of the visible URL on search results. Noted by Search Engine Land, Patrick Altoft and Google System blog.

So I decided to dig deeper and found one interesting numerical parameter value. First ranked page gets a value of one, second has 2, and so on. Parameter values are embedded on a JavaScript event such as the following:

Copying the URL directly from the search result shows a similar parameter value embedded on another variable.

What are the possible uses of Google with these values?

Keyword ranking report is possible in Google Analytics
Following Damon Gudaitis’ approach on Google Analytics using advanced filters allows the tool to provide keyword ranking reports. This feature is not available by default so following his steps is necessary to view results.

Google Webmasters Top QueriesGoogle Webmasters features a report about top queries, their search share and current rankings. As Google can easily determine a keyword off a referral string, associating it with the “cd” parameter value would be useful in generating such Google Webmasters report such as below.